1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to machine translation and, in particular, to a method, apparatus, and program for measurement of quality for machine translation.
2. Description of Related Art
Machine Translation (MT) is a computer technology wherein a computer software program or computer hardware translates a textual source human language “x” (SHLx) into some textual target human language “y” (THLy). An example is translation from English to German. For clarity, the notation of “THLy=MTxy(SHLx)” is used to represent translation from language x to language y (Mtxy) when applied against a source human language text in language x (SHLx) to result in a target or translated human language text in language y (THLy). In the example of translation from English to German, the notation is THLg=MTeg(SHLe).
This technology has been in research and development for decades and is just now emerging on a broad basis as practical and useful for commercial applications. One fundamental complexity with MT is how to yield a high intelligibility and accuracy of the THL. For simplicity, intelligibility and accuracy are termed “quality.”
Measuring quality of THL is a complex problem in MT as well as translation by a person. This is because, for any particular set of SHL, there may be an infinite set of valid THL. A common approach to measurement of quality is through manual human testing and analysis. This testing and analysis is costly and subjective.
Software techniques are used to determine quality of THL; however, these techniques use internal mechanisms during the various phases of MT to accumulate a “guess” as to the resulting quality. Data points from parsing, disambiguation, transfer and overall knowledge as to an MT system's capabilities with respect to under generation, over generation, and brittleness can yield insight as to a quality assertion. This assertion may be at a sentence level and ultimately modeled to larger units such as a page of text. However, it would be advantageous to provide a method, apparatus, and program for validating low quality translated human language.